How about we act like responsible adults and pay the debt we have incurred instead of running away from responsibility.

This "not my problem attitude" you have is pervasive in our society. Take out a mortgage you can't afford? No problem, just walk away or let the government bail you out. Credit card debt? Don't pay it...just walw away. What ever happened to responsibilty?

I think the MLive forum is fine with the exception of sometimes uneven and overaggressive moderation.

I would concentrate on improving the atrocious layout of the new MLive. There should be an opinion link on the top of the page for example. How hard would that be? Now if you want to check the opinion pages of the various newspapers it is incredibly cumbersome. Fix the obvious problems first.

How about we blame the teachers for the money the politicians stole from them? That sounds like a good plan.

Or we could act responsibly and pay our debt to those we owe the money to. It's like running up a credit card debt and then refusing to pay because you spent all your money on other things. How to replace the stolen funds? You would do it by raising taxes or cutting in other areas.

For more than 15 years, the Legislature has taken money out of the retirement fund to help plug holes in our state budget that were certainly not caused by our teachers,”
“Yet here you are claiming you are solving a problem that was created by our predecessors and exacerbated when you took $1.5 billion out of the school aid fund over the last 16 months. And now you want to shift the blame on our educators … the same people who played by the rules, negotiated for their compensation, which included retirement. What kind of a message does that send, not only to our future teachers, but our own children?”

For more than 15 years, the Legislature has taken money out of the retirement fund to help plug holes in our state budget that were certainly not caused by our teachers,” Whitmer said.

“Yet here you are claiming you are solving a problem that was created by our predecessors and exacerbated when you took $1.5 billion out of the school aid fund over the last 16 months. And now you want to shift the blame on our educators … the same people who played by the rules, negotiated for their compensation, which included retirement. What kind of a message does that send, not only to our future teachers, but our own children?”

That's it in a nutshell. The money earned by teachers was stolen by politicians. Why the anger toward hard working teachers? They just got their pockets picked.

Great letter. It won't be received well by the anti-education folks. But a lot of us still value education. It is sad that the teaching profession is constantly under attack by the anti-education contingent. One commenter even compared a hard working teacher to someone on welfare! Ah....the dumbing down of society....be careful what you wish for.

Great point. It's not the fact that tuition has increased tenfold in the last 30 years. It's not the fact that jobs that don't require a college degree are few and far between....no, not that...it's just that parents didn't save enough.

Simple answers to complex problems are so nice because you don't have to think.